For more than six decades, a tombstone at the Sunnyside Cemetery in Caney, Kan., has marked Pvt. Leonard Kittle's final resting place. On Saturday, he will at last be buried there as his family looks on.

Kittle was one of 17 people aboard a military plane that crashed in Alaska in 1952 whose remains have been identified after being recovered from a melting glacier where the wreckage was found, the U.S. Department of Defense said Wednesday.

The service members' remains will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors, Defense Department officials said. There were 52 crew members and service members from various military branches onboard when the plane crashed near Anchorage, Alaska, on Nov. 22, 1952.

A week after the crash, the military declared Kittle and everyone onboard dead, said his younger sister, Beatrice Crawford, 82, of Bartlesville, Okla.

"They told us that they were no longer with us, that they'd given up the hunting," she said Wednesday.

"I'm happy we're finally going to bring him home," she said. "He's been up there a long time."

The plane, a C-124 Globemaster, had been traveling from McChord Air Force Base in Washington state to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska when it crashed. At the time, poor weather impeded search and recovery efforts, the Defense Department said.

In June 2012, the crew of an Alaska National Guard helicopter saw wreckage from the crash during a training mission over the Colony Glacier, located just west of Mount Gannett, the Defense Department said. A National Guard team visited the site several days later to take photographs and found artifacts from the plane.

A search team found additional evidence, including life support equipment from the wreckage. After more artifacts surfaced on the melting glacier in 2013, crews collected even more evidence, including possible human remains.

Scientists used forensic tools and circumstantial evidence to identify the 17 service members, the defense department said. The 35 other victims have not been recovered, but the site will continue to be monitored.